“Hi Renuka hope u r well. Really gr8 that u write po8ry 😄 My daughter is in the 11th grade at SPS, like v were, nd aslo writes. Will u tke a luk at it?” The FB inbox message ping brought my already distracted mind to the pop-up box that had opened up on the side of my screen. The message is from Bhargavi, one of my recent additions to the FB friends list thanks to the special school reunion drive for our class to mark 25 years since graduation. In fact the special invitation (accompanied by many insisting requests from the alumni association to attend it) was precisely what had destroyed my morning’s peace and had me distracted.
This message gave me that distinct sense of desperation that I had tried to get away from all my life. And it is perhaps the same desperation that pushes me to click on the profile instead of hitting delete and logging out of FB for the day. I click on her profile to remind myself of who she is. Her page opens up to lots of family photographs. She has put on weight, is married to a chubby man, and has two chubby children. The older chubby child looks like she could be in the eleventh grade and so must be the po8. The family photographs are from picnics, parties, vacations, more parties with more relatives, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Birthday parties, anniversaries, festivals, holidays, friends, so many friends from work, from the neighbourhood from a vacation taken in the Bahamas in 2005. I keep scrolling down and down her wall, there is an occasional funeral of a very distant relative, an illness or so, perhaps, that is easily combated but all so well attended with so many people and all so close. I encountered more diwalis, christmases and new years with merry cheer than I suspected were celebrated in a year. They all look happy so they must be. Happy Bhargavi.
Having spent over half-an-hour on her FB profile, frankly all I remembered of the Bhargavi of over twenty-five years ago was that she was a slim and sharp Odiya girl who intimidated the fuck out of me with her confidence and her beautiful singing voice. She was nice to me, I think, though we were never friends. I was too afraid of her to have been friends with her.
That bit of memory intrigued me. Why was I afraid of her? The certainty that I was afraid of her my gut reiterated to me but furnished no details.
She has put on weight no doubt but she is not ungainly. Draped in lush sarees, her long hair mostly let loose, she is still singing her heart out as is evident from the pictures. There are photos of raucous parties (without the chubby children) where she has a wine glass balanced on her head while her chubby husband is looking at her dotingly, and no, that is not a table top that she is teetering on! The images are blurred and all the faces have red eyes. In fact most of the photographs are very badly taken, but then if you have lots of family and friends and causes for celebration to fill the frame, the aesthetics of the photos itself is never the point in the thousands of photos that get taken and posted online every second. This insistence of blurry documentation I have never understood at all. But this particular photo of hers, this over-exposed photo with her hair wild, wine glass atop her head, husband with demon eyes and shadowy figures in the background all caught mid-dance – there is something haunting, something haunted about it, but beyond my increasing uneasiness I cannot put my finger on anything that is actually wrong with the picture except that it is a badly taken photo, that’s all.
But that is never all, if I have learnt anything at all from my shrinking life, there is always more than meets the eye and more reason to hide where no one can see me.
In the last five years or so I have hid myself in poetry and photography. There is no better hiding place I have learnt. You are hiding in plain sight and rest assured you will never be seen because all those who are reading you think you have handed yourself over on a platter. They think they have caught you, red handed. They think they get you. And so they love you. Love you to pieces. Love your pieces because you never hand them the whole, only severed parts aching to be whole. You sell the aching. You have made a successful career selling raw hurt. I will admit that there are days when even I have wondered if it is actually good poetry, because if it isn’t then I traded with the devil to sell my soul for sorrow – and all of it for nothing.
I brood over my cup of bitter black coffee, my fifth cup of the morning, and switch to my FB profile from Bhargavi’s. Ah, my ode to myself. A page devoted to aesthetic photography and poetry. The subject of both is basically me, of course. Critics have credited me with taking the selfie out of the hands of the self-obsessed to the truly self-annihilatingly-self-worthy. Their coinage not mine.
I like to think of my work, the photography and the poetry, since they are a composite whole, I mean every piece of work I add to my oeuvre be it word or image, it is really adding to all of my work which should be seenread / sceneread together quite like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass but whereas Whitman was only planting a larger and larger front lawn, my body of work is my body and my body is the whole world and every sordid, broken and hurting thing in it… and so it goes in my head – the interview I am giving to rapt audiences under glittering lights in a fancy auditorium, television cameras intent on my face and especially on my dark, sad eyes. I know, I know #delusionsofgrandeur. The thing is, hashtagpoetry, my coinage not theirs, got me to soar on instagram and I have more followers on it now and more hearts per post than the total number of people who will read Jane Austen this century, but it don’t come with no real life interviews, not yet at any rate.
I have not lost hope and I have not stopped practicing. There are the minor neighborhood litfest panels I am invited to be on sometimes that are invariably on the subject of digital literature, but somehow none of them have quite had the setting of my dream interview. They tell me someone is writing a paper on my body of work for a conference at the University of Manitoba. So there, that’s for those who think I am nothing but a fraudulent persona. Fraudulent? Persona? Seriously? #sorrowporn
I scroll down my FB page, just to purge from my imagination the earlier images from Bhargavi’s page, and see post after post of neatly framed minimalist suggestions of deepest agony designed to draw just a little bit of blood with your tears and leave you an aftertaste of rage. I take heart in how many people have read these posts and loved them and left me comments telling me that it touched them in their deepest core, and that it is the truth I utter, and that my god, I am truly blessed by god.
Yes, you guessed right. I am an atheist. You can’t believe in god and hold on to sorrow with quite the tenacity as I have. Give me anything and I can make it into a lamentable loss or a grievous injury, both have an equally throbbing heartbeat believe me. I have had it with those who’d rather not be reminded every day that with every passing day we are actually closer to death than we were the day before. Who could deny that everything we say or do is not always already tainted with the damning privilege of capitalism and patriarchy but those who are damned by its privilege… Oh! I went off on an interview rant again in my head, didn’t I? I give myself such few lines in my poetry that the possibility of these fulsome interview conversations are beginning to feel more and more satisfying, I must say. Though it scares me a bit, this drawing of satisfaction from using so many words. Too many words, too much space, first only in my head, then on my body and then who knows what. I shudder at the possibility.
Another FB message ping from Bhargavi, “Sry to bother. My daughter’s name is Swayamvarika. She really lks ur po8ry.”
At first I feel aghast. It cannot be. Then I try to clarify to myself what horrified me more, that she named her daughter to mean one-who-picked-her-own-husband or that the said chubby teenaged husband picker liked my po8ry. Hell I didn’t even know I wrote po8ry, I suddenly feel super protective of my neat white slides of jpeg images with some carefully typeset words laid on them like fresh jasmine wreaths on a dead child. Oh my children what have I exposed you to.
And then I find myself going back to Bhargavi’s profile page, from there to Swayamvarika’s. Not a public profile. Smart child. But there are enough public posts and those in which her mother is tagged for me to get a sense for who this reader of my poetry might be.
Usual high school type photos with friends. Bespectacled chubby child with pig tails among not so chubby children. SPS classrooms, playgrounds, canteen. At that age we thought nothing of piling on top of each other laughing uproariously taking pictures, mouth open, hair flying, hands flailing, falling entirely over except for someone holding you up and who is in turn held up by another haplessly falling down on a pile up of laughing children. Except this child was not so much in the pile up as behind it, looking kind of petrified.
That familiar desperation had returned to my gut. As photo after photo revealed to me a child left out of the bubble of happiness. And I remembered why her mother scared me so much. Bhargavi was everything I was not. She was loudly, rudely, conspicuously happy. I was quietly, self-effacingly, unnoticeably unhappy. I hoped unnoticeably because I really didn’t want my extra 39 kgs to be seen.
I typed my reply to Bhargavi:
Dear Bhargavi, how nice to hear from you after so long. I hope you are well too. I will be glad to read Swyamvarika’s poetry. Please have her email them to me. You will find my email address under the contact section on my website. Best wishes. Etc.
Then I typed a reply to the SPS alumni association’s email:
Dear Organizers,
I am humbled and honored by your invitation to attend the 25th anniversary of my class’s graduation from school and to be invited to deliver the annual distinguished alumni lecture this year. Please note that the lecture will be titled “Digital Minimalism or How Internet Poetry is Showing Publishers the Finger.” My speakers’ fee is non-negotiable as mentioned in my previous email. Subject to your agreement, of which you make no mention in your previous email, I am happy to participate.
Sincerely, etc….
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The thing is this. Those extra 39 kgs, I really held on to it. At age 43 it is my exact weight; I suppose there is a point-of-view that makes everyone look chubby.
Editor’s Note: The spellings that are used as social media exchanges are kept as it is perceived.
DoubleSpeak 